In his final State of the State address Wednesday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said if he had to choose one word to describe his focus for 2010, it would be “priorities.” It’s heartening that he seems to have chosen most of the right ones.

Some of his specific proposals are flawed. But the areas he’s picked — jobs, education and government reform — will help the state thrive as it emerges from this devastating recession.

The Legislature should heed Schwarzenegger’s call to approve the reforms proposed by the bipartisan group California Forward. The group is trying to get its Best Practices Budget Accountability Act on the ballot in November, but lawmakers could eliminate the need to gather signatures by passing it themselves.

The group wants, among other things, to allow lawmakers to pass a budget with a simple majority vote; to require spikes in revenue to be spent on one-time purposes; and to force legislators to identify a revenue source for each tax cut or new program they propose.

Putting these reforms on the ballot through a two-thirds vote of the Legislature, rather than through signature gathering, would give them a strong imprimatur. And it would give Californians some confidence that their lawmakers are capable of doing what’s right.

The governor also is asking the Legislature to approve a $500 million package to create as many as 100,000 jobs. He wants to use money from the state’s Unemployment Compensation Disability Fund for work force training, a renewal of the $10,000 homebuyer tax credit, streamlining of construction regulations and a sales-tax exemption for green-tech companies that buy manufacturing equipment. All are smart ideas that can help the state recover.

Perhaps the most welcome idea in the address, though, was Schwarzenegger’s renewed commitment to education — in particular, the state’s colleges and universities. “If you have two states and one spends more on educating and the other one spends more on incarcerating, in which state’s economy would you invest?” he argued.

He made a radical proposal to remedy that budgeting inequity: a constitutional amendment to guarantee that no less than 10 percent of the budget go to higher education and no more than 7 percent go to prisons. It would also allow the privatization of prisons to save money.

Although we applaud the motivation, the details are problematic. Strict spending requirements are one of the major problems with the current budget process; setting new ones wouldn’t help. Given the massive deficit, privatizing prisons shouldn’t be off the table. But the implications would be far-reaching, and the concept needs more study.

His commitment to education — the majority of the state budget — means the governor is likely to suggest devastating cuts to health and human services when he announces his budget plan Friday. The potential trade-offs will bear watching.

But the governor made it clear that the state can’t abandon its long-standing commitment to world-class colleges and universities. That commitment helped fuel the Golden State over the past 50 years. It has the potential to do the same today.

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